Researching inhabitant agency in interactive architecture

Abstract

The study of Interactive Architecture (IA) spans over several decades and appears to be gaining increasing momentum in recent years. Yet, inhabitant-centered approaches towards research and design in the field stll have a long way ahead to explore. Partcularly, we observed that the examination of IA's social relevance in literature is stll incipient and ill supported by evidence. The study discussed in this paper is atempting to remediate this gap by exploring one of the first socio-politcal arguments around the relevance of IA, namely inhabitant empowerment and agency. It investgates whether an inhabitant's relation and experience with interactive spaces, conceived according to different interaction strategies, increases the partcipants' perception of their own agency in the space. In this paper, we briefly explain the prototyping of an interactive space-plan designed to emulate the behavior of four basic models of interaction. Finally, the paper presents an experimental study set to test inhabitant agency in IA. It concludes that IA has the potental to increase inhabitant agency, but that this is very dependable on the system's design regarding behavior and interaction.